The First Impact of the New Movie Rating : Film: The New York Times decides to publish advertisements for adults-only fare. The Los Angeles Times’ policy is under review.

A major hurdle in testing the effectiveness of the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s new NC-17 adults-only movie rating was cleared Thursday when the New York Times issued a new policy accepting advertising for all MPAA-rated films, providing the ads themselves are in good taste.

The decision is considered crucial to distributors who have refused to release films with the MPAA’s old X rating because many newspapers and television stations, themselves convinced that X meant pornography, would not accept ads for them. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times were among the major papers with advertising bans on X-rated films; a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Times said Thursday the current policy regarding adults-only movie is under review.

The X rating, which was co-opted by film pornographers in the early ‘70s, was abolished by the MPAA this week and replaced by the NC-17 (no children younger than 17 admitted). The change was in reaction to continuing protests from film critics and filmmakers who maintained the X rating had been so stigmatized by its association with hard-core sex films that it was useless for legitimate movies.

The New York Times’ statement said the paper would “accept ads for all movies that are rated by the MPAA, including those rated NC-17, providing the ads themselves are in acceptable taste. Ads for movies carrying self-proclaimed ratings, including X, or those that are unrated, are unacceptable unless the movies have received critical acclaim or we have reason to believe that the principal emphasis is not on the portrayal of sex acts.”

The current policy at the Los Angeles Times is to refuse ads for X-rated movies unless Times critics assured the advertising department that the films were not pornographic. For the time being, a Times spokeswoman said, the same policy applies to NC-17 films.

NBC said it would accept ads for NC-17-rated films but that the appropriateness of each ad would be judged on an individual basis. No commercials for NC-17 films will be broadcast before 11:30 p.m., the network said.

ABC and Fox television networks said that they were considering the acceptability of the new rating category. CBS could not be reached for comment.

The first movie to test the new NC-17 rating acceptability will be Universal Pictures’ “Henry & June,” a movie that was rated X by the MPAA but which has now been changed to NC-17. The studio had planned to appeal for an R rating at a Wednesday hearing before MPAA appeals board members in New York, but that hearing was rendered moot by the MPAA’s announcement of a new adults-only designation.

Before the change, Universal marketing executives were gambling on winning the R on appeal and had prepared newspaper advertising with the R rating attached.

“It’s a simple matter to replace the R label with an NC-17 on the ad copy,” said a Universal source, noting it would be no problem to meet media deadlines for the movie’s limited opening next Friday. Even so, because the rating controversy continued into early this week, the studio missed advertising breaks in this Sunday’s major entertainment sections and has not been able to run trailers in movie theaters.

“Henry & June,” writer-director Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of novelist Anais Nin’s account of her love affair with writer Henry Miller and her sexual obsession with Miller’s wife, June, was the first major studio film in years to receive an X rating. Among the material in “Henry & June” that was believed to have triggered the X rating from the MPAA’s Classification & Ratings Administration are three intimate scenes between two women.

Because of its status, “Henry & June” was considered a test of the X rating which had increasingly come under fire from filmmakers, producers and critics. All groups had cited the economic burden that came with an X rating because of the public’s perception that it meant hard-core sex.

Also contributing to this story was Steve Weinstein.